criminal areas of inquiry about potential criminality that the d.a. s office was looking into at the time you joined. you say one of them was the hush money payment to stormy daniels. another one was taxes, potential improper business expense deductions, deductions of consulting feesio in his relationship with deutsche bank could he have defrauded deutsche bank by getting financing through overstated financial statements, whether he had engaged in money laundering using overseas bank accounts. the accuracy of materials he provided to the gsa about the old post office and a host of other things including insurance fraud, the restructuring of his loan on his chicago skyscraper. you go on and on and on. when you describe that litany of areas of potential criminal inquiry for trump and when you describe your reasoning and the debates between you and your team about the hush money thing, are you giving a potential life line to donald trump s defense lawyers that if they do end up
this book is making everybody lose their minds. it s making everybody very angry. people really are losing their damnlo mines over this book, an it is full of red hot allegations and information. i mean, mr. pomerantz is criticizing thera d.a. for a decision not to go ahead a year ago with potential charges against trump, but the d.a. does now appear to be pursuing something along those lines, and we re going to talk about that in detail, the difference between what the d.a. is pursuing versus what mr. pomerantz wanted to charge trump with a couple of years ago, but people are also mad because here s mark pomerantz who was involved in this investigation now talking and writing about how the investigation worked and what they thought and what they found and what they argued about behind the scenes and because of that very unusual circumstance from a somebody working in a prosecutor s office, there is right now sort of a furious counterargument against mr. pomerantz and how he wanted
this is from page 113 of mark pomerantz s new book, which is called people vs. donald trump. it comes out tonight at midnight. we were looking at instance after instance of suspected illegal conduct. of course, they had to be provable, but if they were proved their collective weight left no doubt in my mind that trump deserved to be prosecuted. measures short of criminal prosecution had been used against trump, and he had dismissed them as trivial. looking at the totality of trump s conduct over the years i thought it was crystal clear that measures short of criminal prosecution meant nothing to him and would not deter him in the slightest from engaging in other anti-social behavior. indeed, the more successful he became, the more brazen was his behavior, he d stiffed many contractors and small business owners who decided to advance services or products to the trump organization because, after all, donald trump was so
intent to n commit or conceal another crime to raise the offense of a falsified business record to a felony from a misdemeanor. now, you say a misdemeanor would not be worth bringing against trump. reasonable people could take issue with that. when we first looked at the falsified business records and saw the legal problem and there was a legal problem, because it s not clear whether the other crime that a defendant has to intend to conceal or commit, whether federal crimes count. michael cohen pled guilty to a federal tocrime, a federal election law a violation but it not clear from the language of thefr statute that this anotr crime that raises the misdemeanor to aat felony can ba federal offense. it may be that that works. it may not be that that works. it s an undecided issue under new york law sode when we first looked at it, we saw, gee, there s a real risk here, a
retired lawyer, but thank you for having me. well, i m happy to have you. you are a man who knows of what you speak and who has been there and done that in terms of the law both asms a federal prosecur and somebody in private practice involved in a lot of complex cases. let me ask you first of all about something i alluded to in the introduction which is that since thetr book was completed, know from sort of a close reading to the use of tense and the way you were describing it, since the book was completed we have seen these moves by the new york d.a. to make a presentment of evidence of some kind to a grand jury in new york athat would lead to asking that grand jury to indict mr. trump. from what we know before the grand jury right now, describing it as hearing witness testimony and reviewing other evidence about those hush money payments, how does that differ from what you thought that the d.a. should charge? well, when we were looking at